38 / 86
Disaster recovery
Disaster Recovery Solutions for UAEU
DELL PowerEdge FC630
DELL PowerEdge FX2 chassis rear view
DELL PowerEdge FX2 chassis with 4x PowerEdge FC630
blade servers installed
A catastrophic failure of a main datacenter or the simple
loss of the servers in a Datacenter is an IT Departments
nightmare scenario.
Some examples of disaster include a natural calamity
like earthquake, cyclone or a man-made disaster such as
a fire, or a technical disaster such as failed hard drives
which even deforms the redundancy. Planning how to
restore services as quickly as possible with the minimal
data loss is a key IT task. Over the years, the mission
critical dependence upon the use of computers in the
day-to-day business activities of many organizations has
become standard. The UAE University is no exception to
this trend.
Consider for a moment the impact of a disaster that
prevents the use of the system to process Student
Registration, Payroll, Accounting and e-learning or any
other vital application for weeks. Students and Faculties
and various departments rely upon IT systems for
instruction, research & administrative purposes all of
which are important to the well-being of the University.
It is hard to estimate the damage to the University that
such an event might cause.
As important as having a disaster recovery plan is,
taking measures to prevent a disaster or to mitigate
its effects beforehand is even more important. The
University Information Technology Services (UITS) has
built a Disaster Recovery site outside Al Ain to host the
University most critical Enterprise IT services for business
continuity.
In order to facilitate the DR site requirements, UITS
has upgraded the existing Physical Servers to the new
generation Blade Servers offered by DELL. UITS adopted
the Virtualization technology in 2010 and the same
technology is used to provision the Virtual Servers in the
remote site hosting the critical application and services.
The high availability features of VMware Virtualization
spectrum helps in having a replicated copy of Virtual
Server as well as the Database Servers running in the
main Data center so that the moment a disaster strikes,
the replicated copy will be activated and all the services
will continue working with minimal downtime and the
users will least experience this impact.
36